Early this morning, we released new feature enhancements for our new Site Search beta, Catalog Manager, and Customer Registration. To learn more about these enhancements, and for important release details, please keep reading.

Important release information

Your Publish Order Settings link in Store Manager may have become active following this release. Please note that an Order Settings publish is not required, unless you made changes to your Order Settings prior to the release and wish to publish these.

New Site Search and Catalog Manager features

In late 2011, we released the new Site Search beta, which included features designed for better merchandising on your search results page and an improved search experience. We’ve just added several new enhancements also designed to achieve this, and have released improvements to the search functionality to make the new Site Search even more robust. You can now:

*Note: A new "promoted" attribute has been added to Catalog Manager as part of the option to specify items to appear first in search results. Learn how to add this attribute.

New Site Search features in the Site Search Settings tool

To check out the new Site Search features, visit your Store Manager and click the "Site Search Settings" link. If you haven’t yet tried the new Site Search, you can learn more about it and get help with enabling it for your store in our online help center.

Facebook ID for Customer Registration

A new option in Checkout & Registration manager allows you to add Facebook as a provider ID shoppers can use to register and authenticate with your store, in addition to the previous Yahoo, Google, and AOL ID options. (This option is not supported for stores built using Web Hosting tools.)

To add Facebook as a provider ID option for your customers, visit the Global Settings section of Checkout & Registration Manager, and click the "Customer Registration" tab. Here, you’ll see the new "Allow Facebook ID" option. In order to enable this option, you must also create a Facebook application to generate a Facebook Application ID and Application Secret. Get help with enabling this feature.

Customers may now use their Facebook ID to register and authenticate with your store

The OpenID® format of our Customer Registration system lets customers authenticate with your store using a popular, trusted provider. By using their existing Yahoo, Facebook, Google, or AOL ID to register and authenticate with your store, your customers also won’t have to remember another user ID or password. If you’re not yet using Customer Registration, learn how to get started.

We appreciate the opportunity to bring you these enhancements, and look forward to bringing you more great features in the weeks and months ahead. Be sure to watch the blog for more release announcements.